Consumers are increasingly shopping online using e-commerce platforms rather than traditional brick-and-mortar stores. Additionally, as mobile devices become more ubiquitous, these consumers are increasingly relying on their mobile devices to browse online shopping catalogues and conduct their shopping online. In response to the ubiquity of mobile device usage, many e-commerce platforms provide interfaces and websites that are “mobile-friendly” and designed for use on small screens and/or touch screens. However, existing e-commerce platforms often fall short of the customer's expectations.
For example, existing e-commerce platforms require users to go through a lengthy checkout process while shopping on their mobile devices. Additionally, many e-commerce platforms require users to create accounts or enable guest checkouts, where users must enter a large volume of information and go through multiple steps to complete their purchases. These lengthy processes create impediments to completing purchases online, resulting in many users conducting their mobile shopping from only a few stores or platforms where they have registered accounts. Additionally, many e-commerce platforms do not expose an Application Programming Interface (API), further adding complexity and impediments to purchasing online, and limiting the number of merchants from which users can effectively conduct online shopping.
Additionally, users sometimes have only a name, title, or image of the product they wish to purchase, and must search for the product to find a merchant that offers it for sale. In some instances, the product may come as a recommendation from another website, such as a review site. This can add multiple cumbersome steps to the online shopping experience, particularly when using mobile devices.
Additionally, e-commerce platforms are often not secure, because merchants associated with e-commerce platforms fail to maintain the security of their e-commerce platforms. For example, merchants often fail to upgrade their e-commerce platforms, fix security flaws within their e-commerce platforms, and/or follow a policy of pushing only tested and secure changes of the e-commerce platform to the production environment (e.g., the production environment is where software and other products are actually put into operation for their intended uses by end users). This can result in exposure of sensitive financial and/or personal information.
Moreover, existing e-commerce platforms often do not allow users to purchase goods and services on the Internet according to their preferences. Since most e-commerce platforms sell goods or services from only a single merchant, users are often deprived of the opportunity to buy goods and services, for example, at the lowest price from a wide array of merchants. And, even if an existing e-commerce platform offers the goods or services from multiple merchants, the e-commerce platform and/or its merchants are often aware of the prices at which other merchants are selling their goods and services. Thus, the e-commerce platform and/or merchants often collude, for example, to maintain a high price for a product. Additionally, users that want convenient and easy online shopping based on their preferences and saved account information (e.g. financial accounts, etc.) need to create multiple accounts to shop on different e-commerce platforms. Accordingly, these e-commerce systems may provide less desirable outcomes for users.
In view of these and other shortcomings and problems, a need exists to provide improved systems and techniques that allow users to conveniently purchase items from e-commerce platforms using their mobile devices and according to their preferences.